Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Cleaning out some hard drive space and found this demo from a painting class either last year or the year before (I can't remember). It is one of my favorites. Love the green hair. The whole thing is about 90 minutes of work and was done with only four basic colors except for the green which was two additional colors added at the very end.

One day in a drawing class I teach I was talking about "Scrap". Scrap is reference material that almost all artists use somewhere in their creative process. It used to be file cabinets full of pages clipped from magazines. Now, artists have is so easy with the wealth of material available on the web. Instead of magazine clippings it is now digital imagery. I have several terabytes of images collected, mostly sorted, and cataloged.

Student artists often have a hard time knowing what reference is for and simply copy images they use. Not only is this sometimes ethically questionable if you are using an image that you did not photograph but it is not the way that scrap should be used. It should be referred to and not copied.

So, in this particular class, I gave each student a different image of a creature created in Spore Creature Creator ( http://www.spore.com/ ). If they simply copied the image they would have a very simplistic and boring drawing. They had to "refer" to use the image to and draw a creature based on it. I generally try and give assignments that I don't mind doing myself. I could not resist myself and here is my result and the original image.

There is this show on the Science Channel called "Oddities". If you have not seen it, you should take a half an hour and watch it at least once. You will see the most interesting things. I am not quite sure if the show is titled for the strange things the shop sells or their clientele. The first time I watched the show, a customer came in that was so interesting I just had to draw him while I watched the rest of the episode. Here is my sketch. Yes, I do draw almost all the time I am watching TV. One of those hard to break habits.